Archive

August 18th, 2016

This has been quite a week for Donald Trump. But how is it playing on Team Hillary? A glimpse at her team's group chat.

Time: 2:04 AM

In Chat: Hillary, Ready4Hillary

Hillary: So this is going well, right?

Ready4Hillary: Yes

Hillary: I keep worrying, though. Should I be in the news more? Every day I look at the newspaper and the first two words in the first headline on every front page are always "Donald Trump."

Ready4Hillary: no, that's good

Hillary: that seems bad

Ready4Hillary: Fact-check rating -- mostly false! The less you do, the better. When you do things, people remember that they don't like you. The best thing to do is try to be invisible and let people see that the alternative is the candidate equivalent of being tossed into a live volcano full of enraged hornets.

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In the next few months, a mixed force of Iraqi Arab and Kurdish security forces - including various Sunni and perhaps some Shiite militia elements - will enter Mosul, clear the city of Islamic State extremists and then work to bring governance, stability and reconstruction to one of Iraq's most complex cities and its province.

There is no question that the Islamic State will be defeated in Mosul; the real question is what comes afterward. Can the post-Islamic State effort resolve the squabbling likely to arise over numerous issues and bring lasting stability to one of Iraq's most diverse and challenging provinces? Failure to do so could lead to ISIS 3.0.

The prospect of the operation to clear Mosul brings to mind experiences from the spring of 2003, when the 101st Airborne Division, which I was privileged to command, entered a Mosul in considerable turmoil. Our first task, once a degree of order had been restored, was to determine how to establish governance. That entailed getting Iraqi partners to help run the city of nearly 2 million people and the rest of Nineveh Province - a very large area about which we knew very little.

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All across America, in little towns like this one, Donald Trump is mainstreaming hate.

This community of Forest Grove, near the farm where I grew up in western Oregon, has historically been a charming, friendly and welcoming community. But in the middle of a physics class at the high school one day this spring, a group of white students suddenly began jeering at their Latino classmates and chanting: “Build a wall! Build a wall!”

The same white students had earlier chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Soon afterward, a student hung a homemade banner in the school reading, “Build a Wall,” prompting Latinos at area schools to stage a walkout.

“They openly express their dislike of my race,” Briana Larios, a 15-year-old Mexican-American honor roll student who hopes to go to Harvard, said of some of her white classmates. Wounded by accusations that she doesn’t belong in the country in which she was born, Briana is thinking of being home-schooled rather than returning to the high school when classes resume.

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It's all coming up aces for the Democrats. Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump by more than seven percentage points nationally in the poll averages. She is ahead by seven points in New Hampshire, eight in Virginia, nine in Pennsylvania and 11 in Colorado - enough to lock up the electoral college. Polls also look good for the Democrats to retake the Senate, especially because former Indiana senator Evan Bayh decided to run for his old seat.

But not all the news is good. Despite the Democrats having the inside track for the executive branch and the upper chamber of Congress, there seems little chance of a Democratic House.

Why? The easy answer is that the Democratic Party - and especially the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee - has failed to take advantage of its opportunity. With the White House nearly clinched and the Senate ripe for retaking, the argument goes, surely the only reason a House takeover appears remote is institutional failure. While the DCCC would like to make between 45 and 60 seats competitive, outside prognosticators put the number in the mid-30s.

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A group of Columbia Law School students felt the "traumatic effects" of the Michael Brown grand jury decision so keenly, they argued, that they needed their finals postponed. A handful of Emory University students were "traumatized" by finding "Trump 2016" chalked on campus sidewalks. A young professor chronicled his traumatizing graduate training, which included discrimination and job anxiety. And in an interview, a "trauma-sensitive yoga" instructor talked through her "hair trauma": "I grew up with really curly, frizzy hair in Miami, Florida. When you're 13, a bad hair day is overwhelming," she said. ". . . Even though I would never compare that to someone who was abused, it's an experience that shaped my identity and, at the time, was intolerable."

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Three University of Texas professors were informed this week that they will be "subject to discipline" if they try to ban concealed handguns from their classrooms. The warning was issued in a state legal brief connected to the professors' lawsuit seeking permission to prohibit guns in class.

It's hard to imagine a more vibrant canvas for culture war than the Texas campus-carry mandate, which went into effect at state colleges and universities earlier this month. Texas is gun country, and the state has joined a half-dozen others that guarantee campus-carry rights. But the University of Texas flagship campus in Austin is an elite institution and a liberal citadel in a state that caroms between business conservative and right-wing nutty.

The pointy-headed professors may once have had their run of the expansive Austin campus. But Republicans in the Legislature showed them who's boss: "You want boys in the girls' bathroom? We can top that. We'll give you loaded guns in your classroom."

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Paul Ryan's empty chastisements of Donald Trump's failures of leadership remind me of my own periodic bouts of highly ineffectual parenting. With every morally reprehensible, politically dangerous and socially damaging attack Trump makes on decency, constitutionalism and individual people, Ryan produces yet another talk bubble of coddling enablement. Ryan is about to write himself into history as one of those who were asleep at the switch at a pivotal moment of American political decline.

On Trump's comments about how supporters of the Second Amendment should respond to Hillary Clinton, he said: "It sounds like just a joke gone bad. I hope he clears it up very quickly. You should never joke about something like that. "

On Trump's attacks on the parents of Army Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed serving in Iraq: "Many Muslim Americans have served valiantly in our military, and made the ultimate sacrifice. Captain Khan was one such brave example. His sacrifice - and that of Khizr and Ghazala Khan - should always be honored. Period."

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There has been a surge of assertions about rising crime recently. At the Republican convention in July, GOP nominee Donald Trump said, "Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration's rollback of criminal enforcement." The Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald echoed these concerns, noting that homicides increased by nearly 17 percent in the 56 largest U.S. cities last year and citing sharp rises in Baltimore, Chicago and the District of Columbia. In an op-ed in last Sunday's Post, Sean Kennedy and Parker Abt made the same case.

As two strong conservatives, let us set the record straight. These statements on rising murders are highly misleading. The truth is that Americans are still experiencing hard-won historic lows in crime.

Ever since I saw a photograph of an Egyptian and a German beach volleyball player confronting each other at the net in Rio, I have been unable to get the image out of my head. Doaa Elghobashy, 19, wears a hijab, long sleeves and black leggings to her ankles. Kira Walkenhorst, 25, is in a dark blue bikini. The outstretched hands of the Olympian women almost meet, the ball between them.

The photo, by Lucy Nicholson of Reuters, juxtaposes two women, two beliefs and two dress codes, brought together by sports. The world confronts less a clash of civilizations than a clash of identities, concertinaed in time and space by technology. The West’s image of Islam and the Muslim image of Western societies are often mutually incommunicable; the incomprehension incubates violence.

No area is as sensitive as that of the treatment of women — women’s roles, sexuality, dress and ambitions. The story is often presented as one of Western emancipation versus Islamic subjugation. That, however, is an inadequate characterization.

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August 17th

Firm supporters of Donald Trump will say his suggestion that "the Second Amendment people" could prevent a President Hillary Clinton from appointing a Supreme Court justice favoring gun control was clearly a call to them to vote against her in November.

Some will say it's just another example of a biased, anti-Trump American news media working their insidious campaign to bring their icon down. They will profess to be aghast at the notion that he might be suggesting that the gun enthusiasts assassinate her, or even unintentionally plant such a horrible notion in anyone's mind.

But whatever his intention or motivation might have been, the very act of uttering those words should be ample justification for voters, regardless of their feelings toward Hillary Clinton, to conclude at long last that Donald Trump lacks the self-discipline and temperament to be President of the United States.

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